• You’ve Still Got Friends In High Places

  September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past 25 years, and across a total of 78 meetings over that time, the Large User Group, or LUG as it is known, has been helping Big Blue keep the AS/400 and IBM i platform on the right track for the very large enterprises that have the system as their platform for running the mission critical applications that are at the heart of the business. The LUG has put forward thousands of requirements to IBM – both things that the organization wants IBM to do and other things that it wants IBM to stop doing – and …

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• Relieving The Anxiety About IBM i Performance

  September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Starting a business is an exciting thing, and one of the most fundamental activities any of us can engage in as members of a capitalist economy. My adage has always been: Those who can work, must; those who can employ, must as well. I have faced my share of those moments, starting a business, with excitement and trepidation and hope. And now, our good friend and colleague, Doug Mewmaw, has hung out his shingle, which says Peak System Performance on it.

  Mewmaw, as you well know from reading The Four Hundred, is an expert on performance analysis and …

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• Google Has a Public Power Systems Cloud, Too

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We have been telling you about a prospective Power Systems offering on the Google Cloud for the better part of two years. Well, it looks like Google and IBM went ahead and launched the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering earlier this year, even if the companies neglected to publicly announce it.

  As part of its new “IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud” offering, Google has installed IBM Power Systems S922 servers in US-East 4, a Google Cloud data center in Northern Virginia, and is selling access to slices of IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems carved up by …

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• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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• Cloud ERP for Less than $400 Per Month? Now There’s a Concept

  July 22, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What do you call a full-fledged ERP system running on a private IBM i cloud that costs less than $400 per month for three users? If you’re Software Concepts – the Massachusetts-based ERP vendor behind the bold new deal – you might call it just what the IBM i ecosystem needed.

  The IBM midrange server has always been something of an enigma in the IT business. Tucked between the giant mainframes running Fortune 100 outfits and the PCs favored by one-man shops, the AS/400 and its progeny have catered to midsized organizations that demand advanced business functionality, but not the …

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• Skytap Bullish On Its Hourly Billing In New IBM i Cloud

  July 8, 2019 Alex Woodie

  After a successful tech preview, Skytap last month announced that its public cloud for IBM i is now open for business. Customers can rent time on Skytap’s IBM i cloud, starting at $200 per month per vCPU or $.50 per hour per vCPU. While the monthly option will work well for production workloads, it’s the hourly billing option that’s turning heads, especially among IBM i developers looking to adopt agile and DevOps practices.

  Skytap isn’t the only cloud option for IBM i customers. There are numerous private cloud offerings launched over the past few years, largely as IBM business partners, …

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• Meet IBM’s New Security Architect for IBM i

  June 17, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Security isn’t just a feature of the IBM i operating system. It’s a fundamental concept that all IBM engineers share as they go about their business building and maintaining the system that’s used by over 120,000 organizations around the world. But when it comes to bringing it all together, there’s one person in charge of ensuring the operating system is as protected as it can be: the security architect.

  The security architect job has been held by several folks in the IBM Rochester lab over the years, including Patrick Botz, Carol Woodbury, and Jeff Uehling. Botz and Woodbury now work …

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• SEA Adapts Messaging App For MSPs

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to managing workloads and applications, managed service providers (MSP) have a unique set of requirements. Due to these requirements, MSPs that run IBM i workloads often end up building their own systems management and monitoring software. With a new release of its message management software, Software Engineering of America (SEA) now has an out-of-the-box solution for MSPs.

  Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady uptick of interest in private cloud environments hosted by MSPs. In the IBM i space, there are now dozens of MSPs operating in the market, including many former IBM business partners …

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• Open Source Is the Future, So Where Does IBM i Fit In?

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server reached a milestone this year when it turned 30 years old, an amazing feat for a remarkable system that continues to provide computational value to tens of thousands of organizations around the world. But another birthday was celebrated this year that the IBM i community should take note of: The 20th anniversary of the beginning of the open source movement.

  Now, this birthday is a little bit questionable because open source software existed before 1998, of course. But the time is worth marking because an important meeting took place in Palo Alto, California, where the phrase …

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• Skytap Says It’s Building a ‘True Cloud’ Offering for IBM i

  December 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have a multitude of managed service providers (MSPs) to choose from for private cloud capabilities, but those looking for a public, AWS-like cloud experience are out of luck. Now an outfit called Skytap is looking to change that by providing a “true cloud” experience that lets IBM i customers scale up and down capacity from a Web GUI.

  Skytap was founded in Seattle, Washington, about 12 years ago to facilitate the development, testing, training, and modernization of enterprise applications destined to run in the public cloud. The venture-backed outfit used its expertise in virtualization to help customers …

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